DCCCafe Weekly reports on Bill gates’ vision for the future, and it contains some intriguing tidbits relevant to 3D virtual globes. (Sourcing is not clear in the article as to when and how Gates’s opining was recorded):
Gates explained his vision of a 3D future as the ability to access distant places from your living room: “You’ll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise,” he said. “Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”
In fact, according to Gates, Microsoft is already spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to create a photorealistic 3D map of the whole world in which we can all interact.
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It seems that Google and Microsoft are on to the same thing. They want to make it so your web surfing experience is focused to a geographical location. That way, we can get the benefits of both the web and real life ÇƒÏ the web has the ability to take you anywhere instantaneously, and real life is, wellǃ∂ real.
So are we now looking at three contenders for next-generation browser? I wonder what Microsoft’s will be called, now that obvious candidates “Explorer” and “Earth” are taken.